"New power minister Veerappa Moily, who was appointed to the post in a Cabinet reshuffle even as Tuesday's unprecedented crisis was still playing out, admitted he faced an enormous task in restoring public confidence.

" 'It is a very difficult and challenging situation, and solutions will have to be found,' Moily said in a series of interviews with Indian television networks, one of which was interrupted by a blackout." [We added the bold for emphasis.]

Our colleague Scott Neuman writes this morning that "it might be too early to say what the exact cause of India's latest massive power outage is, but in its simplest form, it probably has something to do with supply and demand –- not enough of the former and too much of the latter."

Indian officials are blaming the blackouts on "energy-hungry states guzzling more than their allotted power" and crashing the grid, the Hindustan Times writes.

One more thing about the outages: Not only have they been the largest ever, at one point on Tuesday about 10 percent of the world's total population was affected.

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